The Toronto film festival opened on Thursday with action movie Looper starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt but it was Twilight star Kristen Stewart who attracted the biggest buzz on the red carpet at the star-studded festival scattered with Oscar hopefuls.
Violence is one of the hard, bad things that exist in the world. It’s not just in films
Anticipation was high for one of the world’s premier film festivals that coming off Venice helps mark the beginning of Hollywood’s awards season. Film-makers see it as a crucial launching pad and Toronto has previously propelled such films as The King’s Speech to go on to success at the Academy Awards.
Ben Affleck, Selena Gomez, Halle Berry, Tom Hanks and rapper-turned reggae wannabe Snoop Dogg, now known as Snoop Lion, are all among a line-up of top stars attending the festival.
But it was Stewart who wowed the red carpet on Thursday, signing autographs to streams of cheering fans in her first media appearance since issuing an unusual public apology for cheating on long-term boyfriend and Twilight co-star Robert Pattinson with British film director Rupert Sanders.
Without directly referring to the scandal, Stewart, 22, said she was thankful “to know that everyone is here” and the support she described as “amazing” before she walked into the premiere of On the Road based on Jack Kerouac’s seminal book of the post-war Beat Generation.
At a nearby theatre, Looper, a futuristic action blockbuster featuring Gordon Levitt and Bruce Willis about an assassin haunted by his time-travelling future self, officially kicked off the 11-day festival that will screen more than 280 films.
It was the first US-China co-production to open the festival but is not one of the films being keenly watched by Oscar observers. It was chosen as the opening film due to its perceived broad entertainment appeal in a slot once mostly reserved for Canadian productions or film-makers.
Director Rian Johnson and the film’s stars said they believed the film had more emotional appeal than pure blockbuster entertainment value.
Asked about the violence in Looper and the wider movie world coming off the Colorado movie house massacre where during a screening of The Dark Knight Rises in July a gunman killed 12 people, Willis defended violence in the movies as a part of their integral, emotional pull.
“Violence is one of the hard, bad things that exist in the world. It’s not just in films; it exists anywhere,” he told reporters. “And to pick one thing out and say ‘Well, you shouldn’t have violence in films or you shouldn’t make violence a part of a film’, would be like taking the emotion out of it.”
Yesterday, the festival turned towards some of the more anticipated films already gaining Oscar buzz, including Ben Affleck’s Argo, based on the story of how the CIA smuggled six Americans during the 1979 Iran hostage crisis.